Users of the internet routinely send electronic messages, commonly known as emails, to each other over the internet. Emails may contain, for example, text, links to web pages or even multimedia data. Emails are a very popular form of communication over the Internet due to the variety of data that may be transmitted, large number of available recipients, speed, low cost and convenience.
The emails may be sent, for example, between friends and family members or between coworkers thereby substituting for traditional letters and office correspondences in many cases. This is made possible because the Internet has very few restrictions on who may send emails, the number of emails they may be transmitted and who may receive the emails. The only real hurdle for sending emails is the requirement is that the sender know the email address of the intended recipient.
The emails travel across the Internet, typically passing from server to server, at amazing speeds achievable only by electronic data. The Internet has the ability to send an email anywhere in the world, often in less than a few minutes. Delivery times are continually being reduced as the internet's ability to transfer electronic data improves.
Most internet users find emails to be much more convenient than traditional mail. Traditional mail requires stamps and envelops to be purchased and a supply maintained, while emails do not require the costs and burden of maintaining a supply of associated products. Emails may also be sent with the click of a few buttons, while letters typically need to be transported to a physical location, such as a mail box, before being sent.
Once a computer and internet connection have been purchased, there are typically few additional costs associated with sending emails. This remains true even if millions, or more, of emails are sent by the same user. Emails thus have the extraordinary power of allowing a single user to send one or more messages to a very large number of people at an extremely low cost.
However, emails' low cost and ease of use have lead to a problem for many Internet users. A small minority of Internet users, typically small commercial enterprises trying to sell a product or service or organizations trying to deliver a message, have created automated processes for indiscriminately sending unsolicited emails to millions, or more, of Internet users. These unsolicited automated emails are typically unwanted by the recipients and are known as spam. Since each Internet user has different preferences in regards to receiving emails, the definition of spam, or what constitutes unwanted emails, may change slightly from user to user.
Each individual spam received by a user uses only a small amount of the user's email account's allotted disk space, requires relatively little time to delete and does little to obscure the email desired by the user. Even a small number of spam, while many users would still find annoying, would nonetheless cause relatively few real problems. However, the number of spam transmitted over the Internet is growing at an alarming rate. While a single or small number of spam is annoying, a large number of spam can fill a user's email account's allotted disk space thereby preventing the receipt of desired emails. Also, a large number of spam can take a significant amount of time to delete and can even obscure the presence of desired emails in the user's email account.
Spam currently comprise such a large portion of Internet communications that they actually cause data transmission problems for the Internet as a whole. Spam create data log jams thereby slowing the delivery of more desired data through the Internet. The larger volume of data created by spam also requires the providers of Internet hardware to buy larger and more powerful, i.e. more expensive, equipment to handle the additional data flow caused by the spam.
Spam have a very poor response rate compared to other forms of advertisement. However, since almost all of the costs/problems for transmitting and receiving spam are absorbed by the recipient of the spam and the providers of the hardware for the Internet, spam is nevertheless commercially viable due its extremely low cost to the transmitter of the spam.
In an effort to reduce the number of emails received, users have installed spam filters on their computers. However, several problems have been noticed by the Applicants with this method. The users' computers (also know as clients) spend processing power in performing the filtering process. Also, the filters on the users' computers receive very little additional data, i.e. only the additional data received by each specific user, that may be used to improve the filter.
Thus there is a need for an improved method of blocking or removing spam from a stream of emails sent to an Internet user that does not tie up client resources and that improves its filtering process by receiving additional information from multiple users.